Nation Making in Russia's Jewish Autonomous Oblast: Initial Goals

Nation Making in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast: Initial Goals and Surprising Results WILLIAM R. SIEGEL oday in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast (Yevreiskaya Avtonomnaya TOblast, or EAO), the nontitular, predominately Russian political leadership has embraced the specifically national aspects of their oblast’s history. In fact, the EAO is undergoing a rebirth of national consciousness and culture in the name of a titular group that has mostly disappeared. According to the 1989 Soviet cen- sus, Jews compose only 4 percent (8,887/214,085) of the EAO’s population; a figure that is decreasing as emigration continues.1 In seeking to uncover the reasons for this phenomenon, I argue that the pres- ence of economic and political incentives has motivated the political leadership of the EAO to employ cultural symbols and to construct a history in its effort to legitimize and thus preserve its designation as an autonomous subject of the Rus- sian Federation. As long as the EAO maintains its status as one of eighty-nine federation subjects, the political power of the current elites will be maintained and the region will be in a more beneficial position from which to achieve economic recovery. The founding in 1928 of the Birobidzhan Jewish National Raion (as the territory was called until the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934) was an outgrowth of Lenin’s general policy toward the non-Russian nationalities. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks faced the difficult task of consolidating their power in the midst of civil war. In order to attract the support of non-Russians, Lenin oversaw the construction of a federal system designed to ease the fears of—and thus appease—non-Russians and to serve as an example of Soviet tolerance toward colonized peoples throughout the world. Soviet eth- nofederalism, as Lenin envisioned it, would not only help the Soviets win the civil war but would also promote the worldwide revolution begun in Russia. William R. Siegel is a law student at Northwestern University. He conducted research throughout the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the summer of 1995 with the support of a research grant from the Russian Research Center of Harvard University. 422 Nation Making in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast 423 Lenin was willing to make initial concessions to the nationalities because he believed that, with the achievement of worldwide communism, the international- ization of the proletariat would transcend national differences. At the basis of this concessionary policy was Lenin’s willingness to grant territorial recognition to federal units. By August 1924, the Committee for the Rural Placement of Working Jews (Komitet po Zemel’nomu Ustroistvu Trudyaschikhsya Evreev or Komzet) was created as the party organization to devise and then implement a plan for Jewish resettlement. To solicit support and financing from the international Jewish com- munity, a parallel, non-party organization called the Public Committee for the Rural Placement of Jewish Workers (Obschestvennyi Komitet po Zemel’nomy Ustroistvu Evreiskikh Trudyaschikhsya or Ozet) was also created in the same peri- od.2 At the core of both of these organizations was the belief that the Soviet Jew- ish issue should be dealt with in a typically Leninist manner. That is, if the Jews were colonized in a compact agricultural settlement, they could organize their political and economic lives as a cohesive autonomous unit of the Soviet federation. However, Komzet had little influence on the process by which a site for the Jewish autonomy was selected. Although Komzet had already begun a number of Jewish resettlement projects in the Crimea and Ukraine, the Soviet elite chose a relatively untouched area along the southern border of the Russian Far East as the site for Jewish territorialization. This choice was entirely unexpected because it was based on a far different set of criteria than those that had previously shaped Komzet’s efforts. The decision to locate Jewish resettlement near the intersection of the Bira and Bidzhan rivers along the Chinese border was based primarily on the general military and economic interests of the center rather than on the spe- cific interests of the Jewish population. Stalin was eager to accelerate the settlement of this Far East territory in order to provide a human shield against poten- tial attacks from Japan or China. In addition, although the harsh climate and poor soil would make agricultural development difficult, the area was rich with natural resources that party leaders intended to exploit.3 Despite opposition from many members of Komzet who favored the Crimea as the most logical location, support by Mikhail Kalinin, nominal head of the Soviet state, and by military and economic interests made the idea of a Far East- ern Jewish autonomy a reality. In 1927, a party-sponsored research group working in the Far East concluded that, due to the lack of development and remote- ness of the territory, resettlement should not begin before 1929.4 Nonetheless, with prompting and guidance from Kalinin and the party’s most powerful elites, the Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet approved a formal request by Komzet in March 1928 to begin Jewish resettlement in Birobidzhan.5 By the end of that spring, 654 Jews, mostly from Ukraine, resettled to Birobidzhan.6 In the next few years, levels of Jewish immigration continued to rise, so that by 1930 Jews composed 8 percent (1,500/37,000) of Birobidzhan’s population.7 In 1932, amid collectivization and famine in Ukraine, Jewish immigration to Birobidzhan reached its apex, as 14,000 settlers made the long trek to the Far East. But just as the levels of settlement rose, so did the numbers of immigrants 424 DEMOKRATIZATSIYA who gave up on the Jewish territory, apparently having decided that the misery of collectivization in their previous territories was preferable to the hopelessness of this nascent Jewish autonomy. Of the 654 Jews who arrived by the spring of 1928, 325 (49.7 percent) had departed by October because of the severe condi- tions that faced the region’s earliest settlers. While estimates vary as to how many of the Jewish settlers of 1932 departed, a member of Ozet guessed 80 percent while the first party secretary of Birobidzhan said 66 percent.8 As the resettlement figure for 1932 illustrates, the Soviet propaganda campaign for Birobidzhan experienced some initial success in attracting Jewish settlers to the territory. On the one hand, promises of limited political autonomy and economic opportunity were an effective means of convincing Jewish members of the country’s downtrodden population to seek out this Soviet promised land. On the other hand, the Soviets were restricted from making any specifically national or religious appeals that might have attracted larger numbers of Jews to the region and been a more effective means of inspiring the early immigrants to with- stand the physical and emotional difficulties of resettlement. In the propaganda directed to encourage Jewish resettlement in Birobidzhan, the Soviets were con- fined to utilizing economic and political incentives because of the limitations of their own ideology. The following excerpt from a 1932 issue of Tribuna, the offi- cial newspaper of Ozet,typifies the Birobidzhan propaganda campaign: The masses of the Jewish toilers, who are permeated with loyalty and devotion to the Soviet regime, are going to Birobidzhan . they are not only fighting for their country, not for a new fatherland, as the USSR is already for them, but for strength- ening the Soviet Union in the Far East.9 This quote demonstrates that although party leaders might have been eager to create the world’s first specifically designated Jewish territory, they attempted to do so without relying on the Zionist imagery and rhetoric that were a central com- ponent of the more accepted non-Soviet effort to establish a Jewish homeland. As the Birobidzhan historian David Vayserman points out, the fact that the Jewish resettlement effort was oriented in opposition to, rather than in concert with, the traditional symbols of Jewish culture and history was a major reason for its fail- ure. According to Vayserman: The Jews—this is a nationality. This is a faith. This is Judaism. This is the Torah, the Old Testament. There was never any of this [here]. The Party categorically banned synagogues. How could the Jews build their own territory without their fundamental roots?10 To augment his point, Vayserman recounts many conversations he has had with Jews who, even though they were devoted Communists, chose to immigrate to Palestine instead of Birobidzhan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They said “We knew that they were building Birobidzhan but we didn’t go there. We went to Palestine. We have already dreamed of building on this land . the land of our ancestors.”11 Nation Making in Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast 425 As Vayserman’s quote demonstrates, party leaders were unwise to portray the EAO as the socialist—and generally preferable—alternative to Palestine, because for those Jews who truly aspired to the goal of national self-preservation, the his- torical and religious significance of the land that became Israel was unmatched. Nonetheless, the Soviets were not hesitant to pursue this competitive strategy, as exemplified by a 1930 Soviet pamphlet, in which Birobidzhan was described as “such a place as, by the wealth of its natural resources, is adapted for the mass resettlement of the Jews” while Palestine was dismissed as “incapable of provid- ing a piece of bread for the scores of thousands of Jews so swindled.”12 This comparison reveals the extent to which the Soviets misunderstood the nationalities issue.

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